The Club's Results

A race that's better quickly forgotten. I had tried the boat briefly a few days before but with different sculls that apparently had significantly slimmer collars. Unfortunately I only realised that the gates were much too tight once I'd pushed out. Quite understandably, neither I nor any of the folks around me on the way to the start happened to have a spanner on them...

The race was accordingly more than unpleasant. I had loosened the gates as much as I dared without risking them to come undone during the race but still had to wrench around the blades violently every stroke. Consequently my hands and forearms were totally cramped up halfway into the race and my technique accordingly screwed up. I haven't sculled that badly in a while!

Crashing into the buoys in regular intervals during the race didn't really help either... every time I caught up with my opponents again I found myself on one or the other side of the lane again. Given that the lanes in P'boro are actually quite wide I must have steered some impressive zig-zag!

Nevertheless I managed to push back several times and in the end I only missed out on the rep by 3 seconds. Which made the whole mess even more annoying! A glance at the results table showed that the first 3 boats in my heat were all within 6s, and the heat itself was about 30s faster than both other heats. (Ulrike)

Pretty smooth and comfortable row given that this was only the 3rd time we were in a 2x together. We had some early buoy-clashes and were down a bit after the start but then started to slowly but continuously push through our opposition to a quite comfortable lead in the finish. (Ulrike)

Slightly more tense and heavy than the heats, but only fair as the wind had picked up a bit and Sarah had literally just jumped out of the single before the race. (Ulrike)

The conditions had decided to turn pretty evil and we had to fight a considerable cross-head wind and some seriously choppy water in an approaching thunderstorm. In combination with the number of races we had already done this made the row more than unpleasant and definitely took its toll on our sculling technique as well. We crashed less than in previous races and beat the 3rd place quite comfortably but were beaten pretty clearly in the end. (Ulrike)